Maybe the most glaring indicator of a failing year in movies is how we react to its successes. Last weekend, Ryan Coogler’s electrifying vampire movi
Maybe the most glaring indicator of a failing year in movies is how we react to its successes. Last weekend, Ryan Coogler’s electrifying vampire movie Sinners opened to gigantic box office numbers in the United States, following a raft of critical praise. It earned an “A” in audience exit scoring, something a horror movie hasn’t achieved in nearly four decades. This would seem to be one of the most positive Hollywood stories of the year, an original film coaxing audiences off of their couches and then mightily delivering on what it advertised.
And yet, to hear some trade reports tell it, the Sinners victory comes with a lot of caveats. There is concern about its budget, about its overseas performance, about a rights deal secured by Coogler that could spell terrible, horrible, no good things for the future of the industry. People who follow this stuff very closely, day in and day out, have seemed reluctant to embrace the early good news about Sinners. Part of that could be blamed on bias; Sinners is a movie very much about Black cultural identity in America, and such films have long been looked at as financial liabilities.
But another reason for the pushback may simply be that things have been so awful in the film industry this year that it feels risky to be confident at all.
How bad? Well, the biggest domestic hit of 2025 is currently A Minecraft Movie, a based-on-a-video-game kids action comedy that is not exactly a high-water mark of quality. Next down the list is Captain America: Brave New World, a leaden and depressing attempt to give the senior Marvel Universe a shot of up-to-date life. The movie performed okay, far below where it needed to—on some ineffable meter in my head—to make up for its cruddiness. Then there’s the made-for-TV stylings of Snow White, a movie no one wanted and no one liked—and not just for stupid, racist, sexist internet reasons. As Marvel slips toward the edge of the cliff, it seems that Disney’s live-action remake model has already fallen off of it. (Though, of course, we’ll see how Lilo & Stitch does later this year.)
To be fair, we knew those movies would probably be bad. But I had high hopes for a up-to-date film from Korean master Bong Joon-ho, the sci-fi adventure Mickey 17. It sadly proved a grand disappointment, a rehash of past work with a clunky up-to-date political message tacked on. Some critics and audiences enjoyed it more than I did, so Mickey 17 is by no means a total wash. But the movie didn’t exactly seep into the cultural consciousness the way that Parasite did.
Horror—of the varietal that’s far cheaper to produce than Sinners—has become a reliable place to turn to for a buzzy taste of the zeitgeist, but what have we gotten this year? Heart Eyes, Wolf Man, Presence (engaging, but little seen), The Monkey, Death of a Unicorn (only horror-adjacent), and the execrable Sundance dud Opus. All came and went with a whiff. We’re four months into the year and it almost feels like nothing has come out yet.
By this time each year, the beginning of “best movies of the year so far” list season, one can typically turn to international films to make up for the lack of outstanding homegrown fare. This year, it’s a different story. Not counting films that were eligible for last year’s Oscars (and thus last year’s lists) but only opened in a real way in 2025—great films like Hard Truths, I’m Still Here, Vermiglio, and others—there’s been precious little to cling to.
That said, seek out On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, from Zambia, wherever you can. And try Black Bag, and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and the sprightly comedy One of Them Days while you’re at it. There have been at least a few worthwhile movies this year, even if nothing lives up to the great redemptive promise of 2025—the thought of which many in the industry were clinging to during the turbulent days of the Hollywood labor strikes, which immediately followed the near-extinction level event that was the pandemic.
This was supposed to be the better year, the rebuilding year, and yet, as of tardy April we’re still wading through the wreckage. That may explain the hesitancy to embrace Sinners too soon; once bitten, twice shy, and all that. But while that mindset is understandable, it’s also frustrating. Now may be the time for radical optimism (thank you, Dua Lipa) rather than the kind of cynicism that has come to dominate so many forecasts of Hollywood futures.
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